Survivor guilt? No, just yellow

Timothy Boyle

LANCE Armstrong has responded to the loss of his seven Tour de France titles as a man does to a passing hurricane, by going underground.

After a career of denial and facade, it's possible that he has nothing left to say. Indeed, the more we learn about Armstrong the clearer it becomes that he never had much to say. But if I had Lance's audience I'd still like to ask him, ''What will you do now?''

The more we learn about Lance Armstrong the clearer it becomes that he never had much to say. Photo: Reuters

History tells us that to go on in the world, a figure like Armstrong will eventually have to apologise. If he managed this with civility, he may even be spoken of someday as the greatest cyclist of a tainted era. But his problem has become one that extends beyond his broken sports-career. His other great raison d'etre has been his cancer charity, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Last week, the foundation tried to remove itself from its founder entirely by changing its official name to Livestrong. This symbolises a significant loss for Armstrong.

The removal of his name is, in part, a concession that Armstrong's unlikely cancer survival and his subsequent charity have inadvertently acted as a crutch, a moral ruse that has helped enable Armstrong's deception. ''He overcame cancer, the worst odds,'' the story went. ''Maybe he's telling us the truth. Maybe he's something special.''

The success of Armstrong's foundation was built, in allegory, on the common image of cancer as a ''battle'' to be fought, a kind of contest. As an athlete, Armstrong inserted himself as the symbolic hero. ''You chose the wrong body,'' he told his cancer, ''You chose the wrong guy.'' The analogy of struggle is in principle a decent one, but Armstrong was a false prophet, ultimately an unsporting man who couldn't restrain himself from self-congratulation and extended his belief in his own importance into his sports career.

In his hugely overrated autobiography is the underlying and, at times, explicit suggestion that he is endowed with qualities that other people lack and that these helped him to survive.

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Armstrong tries to check himself by inserting moments of humility such as: ''There's a lot of luck. I'll never know how much of a part I played in my own cure.'' But elsewhere he underhandedly employs others to deliver on his real feelings. He quotes his doctor: ''Lance, I think you were fated to get this type of illness. One, because maybe you could overcome it and, two, because your potential as a human was so much greater than just being a cyclist.''

He doesn't bother to explain what this might mean in the book but implies that he started the foundation soon after. Nor does he acknowledge that his own usefulness in raising money came precisely from his fame as a cyclist and that these two things would be inseparable for him. ''I started to think that my role in life was not to be a cyclist,'' he wrote, ''but to be a cancer survivor.''

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Charities are essentially inviolable things and it's because they provide immunity to people that it's important to critique their beneficiaries. Armstrong did not choose cancer, it infiltrated his life and he shifted along with it, starting the foundation partly because he could afford to and, in fairness to him, because he was moved by cancer's effect on people. But Armstrong has benefited from his charity because he surrounded himself with the solidarity of good will and evangelised the power of hope and belief to the benefit of his sports career.

It remains an impossible task to reconcile the gesture of Armstrong's humility with the deception of his actions. In his own writings he speaks of a dichotomy between a Lance pre- and post-cancer. He reported to us that cancer had ''humbled him'' but what we find post-cancer is Armstrong's greatest misdirection - his succession of seven Tour wins and his perpetual promise that he was clean.

Armstrong is clearly a person of rare extremes; he is extremely talented, extremely driven, extremely solipsistic and extremely deceptive. All of these things make him a person of note but not of admiration.

After his comeback from illness and his initial Tour win Armstrong, in his shout-out to the regular people, wrote this: ''I want to tell the truth. I'm sure you'd like to hear about how Lance Armstrong became a Great American and an Inspiration To Us All, how he won the Tour de France, the road race that's considered the single most gruelling sporting event on the face of the earth. You want to hear about faith and mystery, and my miraculous comeback. You want to hear about my lyrical climb through the Alps and my heroic conquering of the Pyrenees, and how it felt. But the Tour was the least of the story.''

What will become of Armstrong, I wonder? His guise as a role model has been undone, both in his sporting and philanthropic careers. Just last week he defiantly incited his critics by tweeting a picture of himself luxuriating at home in front of his seven framed Tour de France yellow jerseys. He looked like the loneliest man in the world.

Needless to say, there needs to be another book - so long as it's written about him and not by him.